Joe Biden on possible pardon for Assange: “We are considering it”

President Joe Biden said today that he is "considering" a request from Australia for the United States to drop charges against the founder of WikiLeaks, Australian journalist Julian Assange.

 
“We are considering it,” Biden said in response to a question posed to him by a reporter during a meeting this Wednesday with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House.

The Australian Parliament reportedly passed a motion in February calling for Assange to be released in his home country, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for an amicable end to the trial against the Wikileaks founder.

Assange avoided immediate extradition to the United States in March following a request from the Supreme Court in London to obtain more guarantees from Washington in relation to the prisoner. If the United States does not provide the requested evidence, the activist could appeal his extradition at a hearing in May.

For US authorities, the journalist and founder of the aforementioned anti-secret site in 2006 put lives at risk by publishing classified military documents provided to him by former army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011.

Virginia prosecutors in 2019 charged Assange, 52, with, among other crimes, conspiracy to attempt to hack a computer in connection with the 2010 release of sensitive military material he obtained through Manning and 17 additional charges under the Act. of Espionage.

Each of the charges would carry a potential sentence of 10 years in prison, meaning that, if convicted, Assange could receive a sentence of up to 175 years behind bars.

His case raised a strong international movement in favor of his release in the midst of the fight against extradition.

The last five years of his life have been spent in Belmarsh prison in London, and for seven years he was a political refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK capital.